Karl Moore sat down with former Prime Minister Joe Clark on Sept. 20, 2008, to talk about government, international affairs and leadership.
Karl Moore: It's interesting looking at it from a management view point: many times we have to work with someone who's a number one. I work with someone who is very well known, so I'm playing second fiddle. You were Prime Minister. You were on the nightly news every single night of the week, practically. Then, you became an outstanding Foreign Affairs Minister, from what I hear within the Foreign Affairs Bureau, for seven years. But, you were number two, playing second fiddle, to a former political rival. How do you deal with that more generally?
Joe Clark: And it was a pretty bitter rivalry at the time. Those were hard fought campaigns. I won one. Brian Mulroney won one. They were both very hard fought and I don't think either one of us when asked to list our best friend in the world would put the other at the top.
But, two things: One – this is more important than it might sound – we came from a minority party. We knew our party wasn't going to win on anybody's single qualities. We had to bring things together, and we knew that innately. We'd grown up with that. And so we were disposed to try and find a way to come together.
Secondly, by and large on most of the major public policy issues, our disagreements were more personal than they were policy based. And I guess I said two, but a third factor was we both worked very hard at it. I don't think there was another Foreign Minister who was given as much latitude in that office as I was by Brian Mulroney.
Very often there were cases where I know his initial instinct was “We shouldn't be doing this.” But I wanted to do it. I made my case. He said, “Try it.” We came back. He was the one who said “This has gone better than I thought it would.” It then became a major part of the policy. We both had more trouble, in fact, with our own enthusiastic supporters than we had with the public at large because Brian and I were prepared to make accommodations that a lot of the people who'd been carrying our flags in the battlefield found more difficult, naturally enough.
But it's an important lesson because there's no doubt that the government which he led, and of which I was a part, benefited very significantly from that partnership. And I think we both thought for a while, “Well, I guess that's the way things are.” But along came Martin and Chrétien and it demonstrated that people who had less reason to fight found less reason to co-operate.
I don't think anyone would attribute the success of the Chrétien years to a successful partnership. Probably the way those two principals worked together was harmful rather than helpful. So, what was it? One, a determination on the part of the parties to make it work. Two, a genuine identification of areas where I would have authority and he would have authority, and a sense of respecting that. And three, a quite thorough attempt to make sure that people whose activities might cause us to slide apart would be encouraged to cause us to come together.
Karl Moore: Did you have to swallow your pride to some degree or was it something that you could come to terms with fairly readily?
Joe Clark: Mulroney made it fairly easy. His people didn't always, but he made it fairly easy. He didn't keep reminding me who had won. He didn't have to particularly, but he didn't.
But my pride took its blow when the votes were being cast. That was not a blow that was delivered by Brian Mulroney directly. That was a blow by my family – people whom I had worked with. People to whom I had said “we're going to make these decisions together” made a decision that was adverse to me in terms of leadership. That was my family and I thought at the time that those rules were fairly straightforward.
I have to say that some of the revelations about what went on in Winnipeg have troubled me about that because I think that this was driven quite literally by other interests and other potential candidates might have taken advantage of what they were doing. I'm distinguishing that from this being driven by another candidate in that race. I don't think it happened. But whatever it was, it was a factor among many that influenced how my family voted and I was enough a member of the family to accept their verdict. I saw nothing but downside to trying to dispute it in the circumstances. I'd gone into a fight. The fight was decided. We had other fights to continue.
Karl Moore: I've talked to a few CEOs who've been fired publicly. We all face setbacks in our careers. But you faced it publicly, as well as your family. How do you deal with that? How do you come to terms with it? The rest of us can learn from that.
Joe Clark: It's harder on the family. These things are always harder on the people who are not in the immediate line of fire because when you're in there, for one thing, you have the opportunity to punch back and in most circumstances you know you've fought a good fight.
The second factor is that people tend to be a little more gentle towards you because you were in the ring and you were fighting. It is harder on families.
Families are judged for things that they really didn't have much influence on. And the meanness, I think, can sometimes accentuate regarding families. But the other thing that happens – very interesting little anecdote – our daughter was seven or eight, younger than that, at the time I lost the convention. She went back to her day school and a little girl she didn't know very well in the school said, “Oh, I saw that picture of your father in the paper.” She turned and said, “Don't talk to me about my father” because most of the comments had been unpleasant. This little girl said, “But it was such a lovely picture” and Catherine sort of immediately embraced the little girl. But what she was showing with an infant's instincts was that the general atmosphere was hard on her and she wasn't conditioned to deal with it. I was more conditioned to deal with it.
The treatment afterwards matters a lot. I mean, to the victor goes the responsibility and Mulroney would have been the person…he would have had options not to invite me into the cabinet. It would have been a dumb thing to do, and he didn't do dumb things. But very generously he made it clear that he wanted me there, that he wanted me playing a major role. So a large part of it is the willingness of the leader, the person who wins, to make room. And then, the obligation upon the person who came second in those circumstances is not to make too much of that.
I accepted that there were some limitations to things I had done. For example, ironically, in that leadership campaign, I won more votes in the party in Quebec than Brian did. He won more votes in Alberta, my home province, than I did. But that meant there was some apprehension about my being active in Quebec in the immediate aftermath of his election because the rank and file of the party in convention had voted for me in the actual vote for the leadership; not the vote to create a convention, but the vote for the leadership. So I didn't spend a lot of time in Quebec in my first two years as Minister. I did other things. And it was mutually understood as to why that was happening.
Karl Moore: Mr. Mulroney sounds a bit more gracious than perhaps his reputation is.
Joe Clark: Yes, he is. There's an inherent graciousness about him. That isn't to say he's not a tough competitor when he has to be, but there is an inherent graciousness about him. I don't know that there are corporate equivalents to the sense of family that used to exist in national political parties in Canada. I suppose some of the long standing corporations. Perhaps some of the large family corporations, where there was identification with individuals, have that. But both Brian Mulroney and I had a fairly strong sense of loyalty to a party in which we had both joined as very young people, and had seen grow. It really was a part of our family. That was, again, in a different time, but I think that conditioned both our personalities.
Karl Moore: A lot of young people are searching for meaning in their work. Not just about money perhaps like the boomers did to some degree. What advice would you have for young people about finding meaning in your work?
Joe Clark: Well, for one thing, I think that there are more opportunities open, in sort of normal employment, to do things. This is sounding convoluted so let me give you an example: I was on a plane flying into something I do in Africa, and some guy came up to me and talked to me. He works for a Canadian bank and he had just won a dispensation that was sending him for three weeks into the wilds of the Democratic Republic of Congo. And I said, “What's this got to do with the banking business?” He said, “Well, they think I'm pretty good. They know I'm interested in this. They're interested in becoming involved in Africa more extensively and when I put the idea to them they said, ‘Go to it.'” Does that happen every day? No. Was it the only time it happened? No.
There is, I think, a greater recognition in the corporate world of the need to address some of those personal aspirations. Call them personal/social aspirations or personal/small “p” political aspirations of people whom they want to grow into broadly based managers. I don't think you would have found that 20 or 25 years ago. So, the world is changing.
I am very much interested in, from a variety of perspectives, the idea of corporate social responsibility. I think it is a natural part of a very substantial business tradition. I think strong businesses, not all of them, but strong businesses, have always had a strong element of social responsibility. And, I think that those companies whom I've seen who take that seriously try to broaden the outlook of the employees who work with them. They try to make the job more than simply a bottom line economic based job.
And I think increasingly, as they begin to plan their activities in a world that's changing (going back to the profound changes I think are affecting Western designed institutions), I think they realize that the adaptations that are going to come with those new worlds are going to be a combination of ingenuity and some sort of experience that is outside the traditional model. In other words, you are going to have to count upon the individual capacity of individual people on a ground to do that. So I think there's an attempt to try and inculcate that.
And I guess there are other social factors going on. Family life has changed. The demands – the child raising demands – among younger generations of at least Western-based employees are much more equal than they were and I think that affects the attitude towards a job; sometimes negatively, but usually positively. So those, I think, are some of the factors that are occurring. I don't work in a corporation. I watch them. So I can't speak about what is really going on inside of them with the authority others could.
Karl Moore: But the idea that business is to make a profit and that's the sole purpose is one that you say “Well, au contraire”…
Joe Clark: Well, I say two things; I think there is an increasing group of people who say that there comes a profit point after which there is also a responsibility to do other things. As importantly, when you're working in areas, as I do, in Africa, you won't make a profit unless you are involved in broader social activities. The old extractive industries used to just be able to go in and pull things out of the ground and uproot what was there and go home. That era is by and large over. It's an interesting question as to whether the change in complexity of investors, whether some of the Asian investment that is now moving into Africa, will cause a roll back on some of the transparency and other devices that we put in place. But that's a different question.
I'm involved in a project in Ghana. It's an interesting day we're speaking. Our project is to harvest the underwater forests that are captured when an artificial lake is created as part of a hydro-electric project. We have the rights, if we can get them out, to harvest the hardwood forest under Lake Volta in Ghana. Friday was the first day of public hearings. We submitted a very comprehensive environmental impact assessment that was well received by officials.
But, as anyone knows, the public hearing process is the thing that can undo a project. We have been diligent enough in our discussions with the local population that the public hearing process – widely participated in, widely advertised – lasted a day and resulted in enthusiastic endorsement by all of the stakeholders in our process.
Had we gone in traditionally, in sort of a traditional approach to Africa, we may not ever have gotten the permits. We are now permitting. The actual permitting is a government decision. But they obviously pay attention to what is going on in a public hearing, particularly in a country where there is an election campaign going on. So, our capacity to find the bottom line profit depended upon the way we proceeded. And if we are going to be as profitable as we hope we will that will happen only because we applied a standard of care to an area that had previously tended to be downplayed.
Karl Moore: You were a foreign affairs minister for seven years. You've travelled the world. Why have you chosen to focus a fair bit of your time on Africa?
Joe Clark: Because no one else…well I can't say no one else does, but not enough do. So I think on one level there's sort of an equity issue. There is a need for attention there.
Secondly, I'm a Canadian and the Canadian impact on Africa has been very substantial. Partly because of things we're not. We're not a former colony. We're not an imperial power. We're not a people who try to tell everybody else how to run their lives. So, we have very strong potential for very strong real relations. We could lose them but they are there.
And there's now a new sort of threat factor. I think that if we emphasize in the developing world only those societies that seem to be doing well – the Brazils, the Chinas, the Indias – then different kinds of turmoil exist elsewhere.
They can be disease. Some of the major diseases that transcend boundaries have come from circumstances where nobody paid enough attention early enough in Africa. They can be conflicts. The numbers of people who are still in active conflict and the repercussions that has. They can be climate change. I've got to check the figures, but I was in the audience of Mary Robinson, the former president of Ireland, the other day who's doing work upon the personal impacts of climate change in Africa and the figures, the numbers of people who were elected to be turned into refugees by some of these climate change developments, off everybody's map, are just mind boggling. I mean they're almost in the hundreds of millions – extraordinary. Those sorts of pressures maybe, at an earlier age, stayed in the part of the world where they occurred. They don't any more. They leak out directly as in all of the movements you're now finding into Africa; people losing their lives or risking their lives on the seas to try and get into Spain. But they also, with climate borne diseases, with terrorist networks that are looking for anger to exploit, they have all kinds of implications.
And I guess finally, you just can't help but be struck at the different level of opportunity walking down the street in High River, Alberta or in Montreal or anywhere in our country or indeed in Europe, and walking down a street in much of Africa. I've taken film footage of sort of ordinary streets and then some war torn streets in Africa today – places I was a few months ago – and take them into kids 14-18 and say, “Look, here's what a 14-year-old lives with in the Democratic Republic of Congo.” One just can't let that sort of thing continue. You have to try and be engaged with it.
There's a kind of quandary to it. I don't understand why Canada's not more involved. I don't understand why the Canadian banks are not more involved in Africa. I don't understand why the Canadian government is backing away from the engagement that I think is a substantial asset to us in Africa. And I think part of the reason has to be there's really been not enough focus on the consequences of backing away.
So, I'm trying to focus on the positive consequences, the advantages that are there and the negative consequences of ignoring. You know who's not ignoring Africa? China's not ignoring Africa. Russia's not ignoring Africa. Russia's just signed a major new deal with Libya. They're in the ending of extensive negotiations with Nigeria and Algeria for a gas line that would go up and could transform energy futures not only in Africa but in Europe. In a sense it's the second volley of what they do, but they're warming up some of those Cold War antagonisms. Why would you expect a Spain or a United Kingdom or a France to help you? They were the colonial powers. Why would you expect the United States, the imperial power, the people who went into Iraq… “Look at us! Help us!”...
Everyone was impressed by the performance of the Chinese at the Olympics. What passed note, what people didn't note as much, was that a year and a half earlier the government of China summonsed to Beijing 53 African leaders, 48 of whom came, even the heads of state or the very senior officials, for a very detailed discussion of co-operation; country by country, commodity by commodity.
As we know, a country that can put that kind of planning into the spectacular Olympics will put that kind of planning into other opportunities. And in addition to that, you know that…I hadn't known this, you probably did; the capacity of Western-based companies to control a lot of resource development is in decline, most sharply in oil and gas. The five or six major Western-based companies that used to account for about 50 per cent of the production are now in the aggregate down to the teens. Their place is being taken increasingly by state owned energy conglomerates. And when one talks about security of supply it's not just the quality of the reserves, it's also a question of who controls the access to the reserves and that control has passed from Western hands to a variety of other hands. Those resources, a lot of them are in Africa. They're not going to move out of state hands in Africa. But the co-operation of those state hands is going to be with congenial countries elsewhere and the Chinese and the Russians are doing better than the Canadians are.
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